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Correctness and composability bugs in the Julia ecosystem

yuri.is

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Re: Correctness and composability bugs in the Julia ecosystem

#121

Post by cs702 »

mbauman wrote: post #118
cs702 wrote: post #115

A more appropriate title for the OP would have been: "A new language that makes it easy to write and use generic algorithms on a growing number of custom types developed by others is bound to experience growing pains as difficult-to-foresee correctness bugs have to be discovered and fixed over time." In my humble opinion, this kind of universal composability , which Julia makes easy via multiple dispatch and naming c…

The most tragic thing here to me is that we're losing Yuri — who has been an invaluable contributor and bug-reporter for issues like these — and that Yuri got burned out instead of feeling empowered.

Yeah, good point. Sometimes I wonder if the fact that so many of the folks developing and using Julia are both highly educated (e.g., in math) and insanely smart (evidently) is a barrier to mass adoption. That is, I wonder if the broader mass of developers out there -- many of whom are less knowledgeable -- find it difficult to benefit from and contribute to the Julia ecosystem.

Re: Correctness and composability bugs in the Julia ecosystem

#122

Post by markkitti »

Rayhem wrote: post #59
coldtea wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Array indexing is such a core thing and I don't understand why anything mathematical or scientific would start with 1. Because starting with 0 is neither math nor array indexing in general. It's just how the base addresss of an array pointer memory block was referenced in C (and it spread from there). Which is why all math focused languages use 1-based (fortran, apl, matlab, r, mathematica, etc.)

> Because starting with 0 is neither math nor array indexing in general. It very, very much is. Polynomials all start at a zero "index", as does just about every expansion I can think of (Fourier, Bessel, Legendre, Chebyshev, Spherical Harmonic, etc.) Combinatorics, too, make lots of use of zero indices and zero-sized sets. As for arrays, I'll leave it to Dijkstra[1] to explain why zero indexing is most natural. Zero…

For some of these polynomials such as Fourier polynomials, it is natural to think about negative subscripts from a pure mathematical perspective. While these can mapped into non-negative integers, it is often intuitive to use the "negative subscripts" as indexes necessitating methods such as `fftshift`. For many of these polynomials the concept of where they "start" is arbitrary.

Re: Correctness and composability bugs in the Julia ecosystem

#123

Post by Gwypaas »

krastanov wrote: post #92
Gwypaas wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but C can read out-of-memory locations too, so what? Simply decades of exploitable security issues.

The Julia example is closer to Rust's `unsafe`. Pretty much every language let's you skip bound checks, in Julia (like other modern languages) it is elective. The author was complaining about a library that decided to skip the bound check in a clumsy way (there happens to be a "correct" way to skip the bound check). It is not really about the language.

Then it makes sense. Thanks for the clarification. Was worried that skipped bounds checks was something more intricate than simply explicitly annotating a statement to say "trust me, I know what I'm doing!".

Re: Correctness and composability bugs in the Julia ecosystem

#125

Post by ChrisRackauckas »

orbifold wrote: post #94
dekhn wrote: post #4

Wait, are those examples real? I remember complaining about 1-bsaed indexing only to be told "julia is great! we have offsetindex". If it's a source of bugs, that ... greatly reduces my future interest in adopting the language.

I was bit by trying to figure out of how to combine unit of measurements with other numerical computations. Ultimately a lot of the features look great on paper, but once you start using them, I only ever was able to produce an ungodly mess instead of what I could accomplish in Python in roughly the same time. Everything that goes beyond what Matlab does, sometimes looks great on paper but is not very pleasant to use…

Anything other than units? I'd be curious to know. Unitful.jl is something which I think is completely the wrong architecture (it violates many standard assumptions about arrays when used in arrays) so that's a somewhat special case (and I plan to create a new units library to completely remove uses of Unitful).

Re: Correctness and composability bugs in the Julia ecosystem

#126

Post by coldtea »

Rayhem wrote: post #83
coldtea wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It very, very much is. Polynomials all start at a zero "index" Notice how you had to put index in quotes. Because it's not an index, it's the degree of each polynomial term, which is a power.

Notice how you're ad homenim-ing the structure of the argument and not the argument itself? I do not at all see how putting quotes around that word invalidates the argument. I did so because mathematical literature doesn't refer to it as an index (rather as a degree as you mentioned), but it very much does index each monomial. There are an infinite number of index sets for each polynomial -- just as i can index the i…

>I do not at all see how putting quotes around that word invalidates the argument

When the argument is:

  [0] is very, very much is [natural for indexes]
and as an example for that points to something that's not an index -- and the person making the argument knows it is not an index, so they have to put index in quotes:

  Polynomials all start at a zero "index"
...then pointing this out, does invalidate the argument. It might not prove that the opposite is true, but it sure does invalidate the argument.

Notice also how there's no ad-hominen in my response (this or the previous one) as you claim. I argue against the case and the choice of example, not against who wrote it.

Re: Correctness and composability bugs in the Julia ecosystem

#127

Post by cbkeller »

CJefferson wrote: post #113
rpmuller wrote: post #79

I've been a part of many language communities, and that the Julia team is the very best in terms of the professionalism of the language and the key modules. Maybe the best response to this is to view it as a call to action for us Julia fanboys/girls to stop cheering and fix some bugs ;-).

I've had a couple of conversations on twitter with Viral B Shah (co creator of Julia) which I found unprofessional, so I stopped learning Julia. Unless he was just having a very bad day, in my opinion he takes badly to minor criticism of Julia (although others might disagree). Edit, here is one thread I could find quickly: The comments aren't particularly bad, but they do feel to me like making a bad faith interpreta…

I don't see anything problematic in what Viral said here; I think it would be fair to say your initial take ("Julia has been the future of machine learning for 10 years and will stay as the future of machine learning for the next 10 years") is likely to be perceived as at least somewhat inflammatory, a defensive response is natural enough in that context.

Re: Correctness and composability bugs in the Julia ecosystem

#128

Post by CJefferson »

cbkeller wrote: post #127
CJefferson wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had a couple of conversations on twitter with Viral B Shah (co creator of Julia) which I found unprofessional, so I stopped learning Julia. Unless he was just having a very bad day, in my opinion he takes badly to minor criticism of Julia (although others might disagree). Edit, here is one thread I could find quickly: The comments aren't particularly bad, but they do feel to me like making a bad faith interpreta…

I don't see anything problematic in what Viral said here; I think it would be fair to say your initial take ("Julia has been the future of machine learning for 10 years and will stay as the future of machine learning for the next 10 years") is likely to be perceived as at least somewhat inflammatory, a defensive response is natural enough in that context.

What part of the conversation justifies "If you truly believe that nobody will ever adopt anything new, we would all have been programming in Fortran or assembly!"? To me that is a stupid escalation -- noone was suggesting not to do new things, Python (the discussed AI alternative) is of course newer than Fortran and assembly for a start!

That just seemed like a bizarre overreaction to me.

Re: Correctness and composability bugs in the Julia ecosystem

#129

Post by joaogui1 »

CJefferson wrote: post #120
Sukera wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have an example? I'd like to know more about this - it must have been quite egregious if it makes you stop learning a language.

I posted one in. It isn't that bad, but to be honest nowadays I believe the community of a language is as important, if not more important, than the language itself. I don't want to get into a community whose leaders just start jumping on random minor Twitter users.

That guy is a famous Kaggler that works for Nvidia, not a minor Twitter user

Re: Correctness and composability bugs in the Julia ecosystem

#130

Post by IshKebab »

sdfhdhjdw3 wrote: post #29
dekhn wrote: post #4

Wait, are those examples real? I remember complaining about 1-bsaed indexing only to be told "julia is great! we have offsetindex". If it's a source of bugs, that ... greatly reduces my future interest in adopting the language.

The problem isn't that 1-base indexing can be "fixed" in Julia. The problem is that you see 1-based indexing as a flaw.

It is a flaw. Computers don't work that way fundamentally, and it introduces lots of awkward translation.
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